Welcome

The point of this blog is to find out the parameters (the less convoluted, the better) required to isolate a given player in major league history from everyone else. By so doing, in essence a "club" is created. For example, selecting one parameter, namely "Homers >= 760," would result in the "Barry Bonds" club.
For the purposes of this blog, therefore, a "club" is something that only one person belongs to. I realize that this is the exact opposite of what clubs generally refer to, but please view that contradiction as intended irony. Another example of a club, is Doubles>=650 Steals>=400, and homers>=250 which is the Craig Biggio club. This little tidbit existed in the form of a mid-game Aflac trivia question and actually sparked the passion that eventually led to this blog.
And getting nuts (this is indeed the point of this blog - to get nuts):
As of Sunday May 25:
IP <= 139, ER >= 83, WHIP >= 1.718, and HBP >= 15 is the one and only Mike Pelfrey club.

The format is going to be determined and perhaps even change along the way. I hopefully will be posting something at least multiple times a week, introduing a few new of these types of "clubs." I will also put the labels in the post of the clubs I made so that, just in case this blog gets continued for a long time and is monstrous eventually, you can just search with a name and the search result will show the requested player and the parameters of his club. Wait, what am I saying, "just in case," this is definitely going to happen! In any event, feel free to contribute by commenting and you can ask questions or provide your own clubs. Or just read it and then click out of it. Or don't do any of the above.

BTW, if you are wondering how to come up with a club for yourself, I would advise that you play around with baseballreference.com's "play index" (PI). Start with a player and go to his page, and in a new window open the play index. Be sure to use the batting or pitching season finder, then choose the second option "Find totals for matching seasons or careers." Mess around with the parameters with min's/max's that you know your player meets, and try to weed out the other qualifiers based on additional parameters that those players don't meet.

There are certain things (for example post season homers, number of grandslams, or all star game doubles) not included with the PI but are still acceptable. But like I mentioned earlier, the less convoluted the better (all star game doubles? Really?) and also you should have some kind of way of summarizing a club. (Like for Biggio, besides for just saying the X homers, Y steals and Z doubles club, you can say it is the extra base hit and speed club). This will all be abundantly clear as I start to post examples in the coming days.

You can't see the full list of results in the PI; all you can see is the #1 return when you organize it by one of the selected parameters, and you need to pay a fee if you want to see the rest (probably worth my $30 investment I plan on making soon.) However, the beauty of this website is that only the first one is significant and no one cares about the rest. So come up with your own club and post the player name with the parameters (let's start out with 5 or less for now), and if its an active player (less appealing), include the date you made the claim!

If you do decide to post a comment, and anyone is always welcome to, grammar and spelling not important (as you can tell from this unproofread post) -- but be readable.

- Simmy